Josh Ramey

Within the context of the so-called psychedelic renaissance, ketamine (C13H16CINO) has been increasingly used for therapeutic purposes. While ketamine clearly has healing powers, what interests me here is less ketamine for healing than what I will call the possibility of knowledge by ketamine. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's arguments for the centrality of metal and metallurgy as a perspective on matter, I speculate that knowledge by ketamine is not identical with, yet verges on, a kind of becoming-metal of consciousness, and an intuition of what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘nonorganic life’ proper to matter. Ketamine trips provide vantage, and in some sense experience of that metallic dimension Deleuze and Guattari claim is inherent in all matter, a fluidity and transformability which for them is the basis of a hydraulic as opposed to solid model of matter, and clue to a vitality that supersedes the distinction of life and death. Intuition of the fundamentally hydraulic or metallic nature of matter is essential to what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadic or ‘minor’ science, one that, because it centres continuous variation rather than discrete form, is capable of challenging the conservative tendencies of ‘major’ or State science. Without making claims for ketamine as in any sense sufficient for a becoming-metal of consciousness, ketamine may be constructively conjugated with other knowledges – knowledge by meditation, by dance, by music, or by martial arts, to name only a few. Such minor sciences of transformation and transmutation remain capable of a negative or corrosive relation to the State, despite the ever-present reality of recapture.

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition. Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice.

My conversion into a knower has been a long and winding road. From childhood reverie to the years of formal schooling, education has never ceased to lure me into its magical power. How do we really get to know/see/learn whatever happens on our educational journey? In this paper, I will re‐trace my quest for knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of traditional epistemology. My wonderings will take me to explore, via Jung, the possibilities of imaginative education through Gnosis and Sophia. The paper intends to weave together several Jungian discourses with their versions by other thinkers who have contributed to the fields of depth psychology, esotericism, and educational philosophy.

Nathan Widder’s Political Theory After Deleuze presents Deleuze’s political work in the context both of Deleuze’s ontology and a broader “ontological turn” in political theory. Contrasting Deleuze with both the “politics of lack” espoused by post-Hegelian and post-psychoanalytical theory, as well as with the “politics of abundance” proffered by pluralists such as William B. Connolly, Widder provides a subtle articulation of the contours and ultimate stakes of Deleuzian micropolitics. The book provides a powerful introduction both to Deleuze’s broader systematic work and to the specifically political dimensions of that perspective.

In this essay I critique the identification of contingency with sheer arbitrary possibility in Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. After offering logical and metaphysical reasons for why such an identification is a limitation on the speculative potential of reason, I draw upon Charles S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Giambattista Vico to articulate the outlines of a view of contingency which can underwrite a different speculative position to one that is grounded upon an absolute of unreason. This form of speculation, a realism of contingency without an axiom of unreason, is indicated in outline by the structure of divination practices. I thus propose, without defending its actuality, at least the possibility of a divinatory form of speculation that is adequate to the absolute status of contingency.

Through a close reading of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, in relation to Minima Moralia and to Dialectic of Enlightenment, this paper aims to interpret the tension between, on the one hand, Adorno’s scathing critique of occultism, and on the other, his subtle and elusive suggestions that authentic thoughthas certain elective affinities with modes of mind, such as are traditionally found in magical theory and practice. This surprising affinity has implications not only for how to read Adorno’s critical project, but also for how to assess the relevance of spirituality for revolutionary and emancipatory politics. If immanent critiquelabors for a re-enchanted world, it may yet be linked to a genuinely spiritual vision of reality.

Through a close reading of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, in relation to Minima Moralia and to Dialectic of Enlightenment, this paper aims to interpret the tension between, on the one hand, Adorno’s scathing critique of occultism, and on the other, his subtle and elusive suggestions that authentic thoughthas certain elective affinities with modes of mind, such as are traditionally found in magical theory and practice. This surprising affinity has implications not only for how to read Adorno’s critical project, but also for how to assess the relevance of spirituality for revolutionary and emancipatory politics. If immanent critiquelabors for a re-enchanted world, it may yet be linked to a genuinely spiritual vision of reality.